THIS IS NOT necessarily a detail that I’d like recorded in the annals of professional bike racing, as a footnote to the first British victory in the World Road Race Championship for 48 years, but soon after thinking ‘I’m the world champion’, another realisation flashed across my thoughts: ‘Fuck … Head and Shoulders.’
Head and Shoulders was the brand of shampoo that I had recently agreed to endorse, and for which I was due to do a major photo shoot two days after the Worlds. It wasn’t dandruff that I was worried about, but – like in January 2010 – a damaged tooth. After the 2002 Giro d’Italia, the American Tyler Hamilton had famously needed 11 of his capped, having fractured his shoulder early in the race and using teeth-grinding as a way of displacing the pain. I’d done something similar over the previous six hours (admittedly without the broken bone, but also without the drugs that Hamilton has now admitted were fuelling him), and it had left me with a smile more suited to Halloween than a major advertising campaign. I had no choice but to clear the diary over the next two days, call off interviews, fly to Manchester and go straight to my dentist. If you look at the adverts we shot later that week, I think you’ll agree that he did a pretty good job.
In my first fortnight as the world champion, I’ll admit that not too much of my time was spent on a bike. There were public appearances, meetings with Simon Bayliff, and, finally, days and evenings to be spent with Peta and Finn without fretting about what I was eating, how long I was staying up and what impact it would have on the next day’s training.
As well as my new manager, I was going to have someone new helping me to stay on top of things – a role that roughly matched the traditional job description of personal assistant but was in actual fact more like a human Swiss Army Knife.
In 2010, partly promoted by Rod Ellingworth’s constant insistence that I got more rest, I’d realised that my afternoons and evenings were filled with tedious admin and practical chores, and that it would be beneficial if someone could lighten that load. One of my mates from the Isle of Man, a guy called Rob Dooley, worked in a bike shop and was looking for a change of direction and scenery. I asked him whether he’d consider being paid to act as my odd-job man and Dools had leapt at the chance.
Dools was a lovely guy but, bless him, a bit chaotic. It didn’t matter for the most part because he generally did what I asked, plus I trusted him and liked having him around. There were, though, times when the disorderliness not only annoyed but also alarmed me. One day in the spring of 2011 particularly stands out: I’d got a call one afternoon – it was from either the BBC or the Giro d’Italia organisers, I can’t remember which – to ask whether I was free to go to Sicily and ride up Mount Etna for a preview of the forthcoming race. It was short notice but I had no prior engagements and so I said, yes, why not. The next day I duly did the ride, the BBC filmed it, and then we all went back to the airport to catch our flights home.
I thought no more of it until, around two weeks later, a letter from the UCI dropped onto my doormat. I opened the envelope, looked down the page, and gulped. The only three words that I remember were ‘missed test notification’.
I should confess straight away that it was naïve and irresponsible to trust another person, whether it was Dools or anyone else, to fill out my anti-doping whereabouts form. These log-sheets had to be continually, accurately updated to allow dope-testing bodies to locate riders for out-of-competition controls. If they were unable to find you and take samples, you got one ‘strike’. Three strikes or ‘missed test notifications’ within the space of 18 months added up to a full-scale anti-doping violation, a ban, and an irredeemably damaged reputation. I was now on one strike.
Dools’s excuse was that, although he’d known about my change of plans and change of location for the day, he hadn’t been able to access the internet and log the new details. I thought it sounded a bit the-dog-ate-my-homework, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and we moved on.
There were further issues over the summer before it all finally came to a head. The catalyst was an unfortunate mistake by my HTC teammate Alex Rasmussen, or rather three pretty half-witted ones, because that was how many ‘missed test notifications’ he had chalked up. The team had no other option but to terminate his contract and immediately send him home from the Tour of Britain.
When I heard the news I suddenly felt an odd, ominous chill. I picked up my phone and immediately scrolled through my contacts to the number of my UK Sport anti-doping liaison officer. When he answered, I asked whether he could look at my whereabouts information and tell me what it said for today’s date.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Here it is. You’re in Italy.’
I kept my composure long and well enough for the correction to be made, thanked him, then ended the call and straight away phoned Dools.
There was no ‘Hey, Dools, how are you?’, no platitudes, just a very abrupt one-line question: ‘Where am I right now?’
‘The Tour of Britain,’ said the sheepish voice at the end of the line.
‘Oh, OK,’ I replied. ‘So how come on my whereabouts form it says that I’m in Italy?’
This was the final straw. As I put it to Dools, ‘If I get three missed tests, you’re going to lose your job but I’m going to lose my career. My career. Do you realise what that means?’
There was nothing that he could really say.
I adjusted my tone, ended my rant, and got to the crux.
‘Look, Dools, thanks for all you’ve done, but I can’t take these risks. You can’t work with me any more. I’ll pay you for the next month, even if you’re not working, but I can’t keep you on.’
Dools didn’t take my decision particularly well and this was the end, sadly, not only of a working relationship but also a friendship. I now needed someone to replace him, but fortunately didn’t have to look too far or hard. Since the start of the year, Rob Hayles and I had been vaguely discussing some arrangement whereby he could help me when he stopped racing at the end of the year: losing Dools had now put me in a position to offer Rob something akin to a full-time position. The fact that Rob had been a top rider, the man who had partnered and mentored me to a first world title on the track in Los Angeles in 2005, not to mention that he was one of my best mates, clearly made him the ideal man for what he would tell you can be quite an onerous role. Although I have a lot of friends and there are a lot of people who want and try to get close to me, Rob was and still is one of a tiny handful who, I know, accept and love me for the person underneath the personality. He can be hilariously funny, sick with it, and he can be infuriatingly laid back for someone as highly strung as me. Even so, it would be very difficult to find someone with a bad word to say about him.
As my ‘Mr Fix It’, Rob was superb from day one, pretty much ensuring that all I needed to do was get up, get dressed and get myself on my bike. He frequently stayed at our house and became part of our family; I was part of his, with his wife, Vicky, a more than capable and very straight-talking second mother.
ON 4 AUGUST Bob officially ended his efforts to keep HTC-Highroad alive beyond the end of 2011, having been unable to secure replacement for HTC as the main sponsor. After informing Bob and Rolf during the Tour that I wouldn’t remain patient any longer, wouldn’t entertain any more promises or even statements of intent from them, I had thought that would at least bring some clarity to my ideas about 2012.
With my new status as World Champion and all of this upheaval in the period either side of the race, it was no real surprise that my training suffered and I had raced only once more, in the French end-of-season Classic Paris–Tours. When I woke on the morning of the race, I was so terrified of getting humiliated in my first outing in the rainbow jersey that it took a stern talking-to from Rod to make me go ahead and race. I managed not to disgrace myself but was never really in with a shout, either, ending up finishing 42nd.
With that fairly anonymous performance and a round of handshakes and goodbyes, my time with the team known in its final incarnation as HTC-Highroad came to an end. Perhaps neither I nor my teammates appreciated the poignancy of the moment at the time, but we all began to realise later what a remarkable, unique team it had been and what a tragedy its demise was. Over four seasons the men’s and women’s teams had amassed a staggering 509 wins, 50 of which had come in stages of major tours. This made us not only by far the most prolific team of our era but one of the greatest of all time.
What made it even more remarkable was that when Bob Stapleton took over what was then the T-Mobile team from the previous free-spending (and, as has subsequently been proven, ethically dubious) regime, he was suddenly working with a heavily reduced budget. This resulted in across-the-board pay cuts and some controversial redundancies among the riders. Despite operating on limited means, he, as Brian Holm put it, ‘whipped our arses’ and instilled a winning mentality and team spirit that became infectious. At the start of every season Brian told himself there was simply no way we could sustain the same level of success, the same fairytale, and yet every year we somehow managed to punch way, way above our weight.
I wondered, though, whether this same pattern of over-achievement wasn’t eventually our undoing: Bob seemed to assume that we would maintain the same standards on our frugal salaries, and that sponsors would come running to buy into such an uncommon, inspirational underdog story. As I told a journalist in an interview in 2010, ‘Bob thinks it’s Hollywood and he’s Steven Spielberg.’
What I saw as his misjudgement and ingratitude – or certainly his failure to understand how uniquely efficient the team had been – had of course soured our relationship in 2010 and 2011. The lack of a satisfactory pay rise or new contract for me were symptomatic of the same thing: him thinking that we’d happily all carry on getting our arses whipped, with no credible promise of a change or reward at the end of it all.
I realise now that I was unfair in my assessment of Bob. He wasn’t intentionally depriving me or anyone else of the money we deserved: he simply didn’t have it. The signs of our poverty were everywhere you looked, from the fact that our bus was just about the only one without a shower to the team failing to pick up the Swiss franc fine that I had incurred for my V-sign at the 2010 Tour of Romandy, as they had promised.
Scandalised by the doping controversies that had rocked the team in 2006 and 2007, T-Mobile had effectively paid to have their contract with the team rescinded and their name disassociated from us: that money ended up accounting for a large wedge of our budget for the next four seasons. Columbia and then HTC had both chipped in, but they had paid a little for a lot of exposure and success and therefore been spoiled. When Bob later went to them to talk about a contract renewal and upping their investment, I can imagine that they balked: why would they pay full price for what we’d previously given them at a huge discount?
The other recurring problem with cycling sponsorship was that it was too effective for brand awareness. The exposure was so fantastic that companies often felt that they had already derived more-than-adequate benefits after only one or two seasons, and therefore didn’t need to stick around for the long haul. For this reason and others, the business of cycling sponsorship didn’t follow the same basic logic or patterns as most others, and I wondered if that was something Bob may not have fully grasped. It occurred to me that with the HTC deal running down and their interest in renewing dead, Bob was perhaps approaching big corporations without considering the single most important factor that seemed to predispose companies to sponsor cycling teams: a love of the sport, usually the CEO’s or a marketing director’s, which meant that sponsorship wasn’t only a strategic initiative but something that they also did for fun, a flight of fancy that they could also justify on business grounds. Perhaps I’m presuming too much when I say that maybe Bob wanted to sign the deal, take their money and go off and run a brilliant team, when a lot of sponsors wanted more engagement and influence than that. Or maybe Bob was just unlucky.
In my final analysis, I’d stand by what I thought at the time: everyone at HTC was over-delivering in their jobs, except the people or person whose responsibility it was to find backing for the most successful, cosmopolitan and attractive team in the sport. That person – although it pains me to admit it – was Bob. On the other hand, I would also admit that I regret the lack of empathy I showed for Bob and my lack of appreciation. What Bob accomplished by taking an under-performing team riddled with systematic cheating and turning it into the best organisation in the sport – and also one of the first to truly combat doping from the inside – makes him worthy of a place among the best managers that professional cycling can ever have seen.
On 11 October, two days after Paris–Tours, the worst-kept secret in professional cycling ceased to be: after months of speculation and weeks of serious negotiations, it was announced that I had signed a three-year deal with Team Sky.
The deal might have seemed inevitable, but what I hadn’t been prepared for, as the lawyers on both sides hammered out the small print, was the collateral effect on friends and current teammates. I had told Mark Renshaw to wait for me to sign for Team Sky before considering any of the other lucrative offers that he’d had, and even said that I would cover lost earnings out of my own pocket if the Team Sky deal didn’t come off. As the days had passed, though, Mark had started to get edgy and couldn’t perceive any real desire on Team Sky’s part to sign him. Meanwhile, on the back of the success that he’d tasted at the Tour of Qatar in February, the Dutch Rabobank team were trying to tempt him with a big salary and the chance to try his hand at being their front-line sprinter rather than a lead-out man. Mark had finally called me to say that he was going with Rabobank, and I’d said that I understood why he made that choice, while deep down thinking that he could have been more loyal and held off for a bit longer.
Brian Holm had been in a similar position – with my solemn word that I’d find a way in for him at Team Sky, but, like Renshaw, not detecting any real will to take him on from Team Sky. Brian also had other options, the best of which seemed to be the Belgian team Omega Pharma–Quick-Step. They were a notoriously old-school outfit, unglamorous and proud, which appealed to the wannabe old rocker in Brian, a man who held Thin Lizzy and Roger De Vlaeminck in equally high esteem. I still didn’t think he’d accept their offer – and was shocked to receive a text from Brian one day in early August announcing that he’d said yes. I text back: ‘You’re fucking kidding me.’ But, alas, he wasn’t.
There was more to my decision to join Team Sky than just the fact that they were a British team which met my asking price and employed riders and staff whom I had known for years: in signing for Team Sky I was also buying into a vision for cycling in the UK that I shared. BSkyB wanted to grow the sport on all levels and their investment reflected that, spanning the track, the road and recreational riding. While money does matter, it has also always been imperative to me to believe in and like any company with which I associate myself. That’s been the case with Nike, who have sponsored me since the start of my career, and with Oakley; it also applied to Team Sky, now that I was aligning myself with their brand. When I turned pro I made a vow to myself never to bow to PR bullshit, never to be untrue to myself, and I’m proud to say that I’ve never really deviated from that principle – often with some fairly incendiary results.
Having essentially spent my entire career in the same team up to that point, I couldn’t have been more excited about the change of scenery. Team Sky represented the best of both worlds – the familiarity of many of the riders and the staff and the novelty of a new environment. After the austerity of HTC, I was looking forward to new and well-funded ways of working. Our first get-together was a two-day meeting in Milan at the end of October to discuss the season just passed and plan for the next one. My expectations were high, but this surpassed them. Dave Brailsford made a speech that captivated everyone, about what the team had already achieved and what our targets for 2012 would be. The attention to detail – from the meals we ate to our clothing fittings for the coming year – was a notch above even what I’d seen at HTC, where we’d always been ahead of the curve.
Team Sky had gained a reputation for professionalism at the expense of enjoyment, but that weekend in Milan suggested that there could be hard play as well as hard work. On the first night, after a formal dinner with team sponsors, we all headed out en masse for a few drinks and ended up in the Just Cavalli nightclub, most of us a little worse for wear. Team-building exercises have become fashionable in cycling in recent years, from survival camps in the forests of Scandinavia to go-karting, but to my mind there aren’t many things better for creating camaraderie than a few drinks, a boogie and a taxi home in the small hours.
Before the year was out there was time for two more bits of good news. The first one, in truth, I’d known about for a few weeks, but could only now reveal: Peta and I were expecting our first child together. She – because I was already sure that it was a girl – had been conceived during the Tour de France and was due in mid-April, in the week of Milan–San Remo.
If the green jersey, the world championship and Peta’s pregnancy hadn’t already made 2011 special enough, more was to follow. A fortnight before Christmas I was voted the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. As much as recognition of my achievement, it was an eloquent statement about how far the sport had come in the UK, bearing in mind that, four years earlier, four Tour stages hadn’t even earned me a nomination. It felt like a culmination but also the start of something even bigger; the plans Team Sky had outlined in Milan went beyond the goal of winning the Tour de France with a clean, British rider by 2014, and beyond almost anything ever achieved by a professional cycling team. I was looking forward to going for the yellow jersey, the green jersey and world domination. ‘Believe in better’ was the BSkyB corporate slogan. I believed that we could be better than anyone imagined.
THE ALMOST ROBOTIC professionalism that I’d seen only in fleeting glimpses in Milan was more evident at Team Sky’s training camps that winter, not that I was complaining. At HTC the first of our two training camps per winter, in particular, had served mainly just to get us back on our bikes and clocking up some kilometres. At Team Sky there were drills and specific exercises every day. I’d trained well all winter, partly because I only needed to glance down at the rainbow stripes across my chest to feel an extra kick of motivation, but also because I thrived on the more regimented style of the Team Sky camps.
This single-minded focus on performance was hard to argue with, since the results were there for rival teams to see and envy, even if they were unable to muster the discipline to emulate them. At the same time, such a Spartan existence took some getting used to, having come from a much more relaxed, convivial ambience at HTC. When training was over every day, there was very little socialising and hardly anyone venturing outside the confines of their room: just about the only extra-curricular activity to look forward to was the odd game of pool. Light relief at Team Sky came in brief snatches – Brad’s impersonations, Jez Hunt walking out of one massage, straight across the corridor and into a another one, lying to the second masseur that he still hadn’t been seen.
The first races on my 2012 programme would be the Tours of Qatar and Oman in February. At our camps in Majorca, former HTC teammates had all agreed that I looked stronger and leaner than in any winter since 2008–9, and my form was matched by my excitement. On the plane to Qatar, though, I began to feel ill. I ended up spending 40 of the 48 hours immediately before stage one in bed. Antibiotics seemed to have cured me – I went on to win stages three and five after some incredible work by Bernie Eisel and the Spaniard, Juan Antonio Flecha – but lethargy kicked in between Qatar and Oman, and continued to affect me for the next few weeks. It was always the same with me and antibiotics: the short-term benefits came with long- or at least mid-term costs.
Oman was a much hillier race than Qatar but under normal circumstances at least four of the six stages lent themselves to sprint finishes. I vaguely contended in only two of them, with our sprint-train as rickety and erratic in Oman as it had been smooth and rapid in Qatar. My assigned lead-out man was the Australian Chris Sutton, who was a decent sprinter in his own right: with him as my last man, though, we just didn’t gel. This early in the year, the lack of any outstanding candidate for this role wasn’t yet a major worry, although I was still disappointed that Mark Renshaw had signed elsewhere. Of the riders on the Team Sky roster, the only one I could envisage doing a comparable job to Renshaw was Geraint Thomas, but his year and road programme revolved around the London Olympics and winning a gold in the team pursuit on the track.
I came home from Oman feeling completely drained. It wasn’t only the lingering effects of the antibiotics but something that had nothing to do with racing: my first child was due in a month’s time and I was scared. The anxiety was making me irritable, the pregnancy was making Peta ratty – especially when I was away at races – and we were starting to get at each other. In Qatar and Oman we’d argued on the phone on a couple of occasions, and although everything quickly returned to normal this only added to my apprehension. I wanted the baby to have a perfect life, a perfect family and perfect parents right from the first day, but we were both trying too hard. Together with after-effects of the antibiotics, the mental strain had started to wear me down and manifest itself in physical pain, specifically in my stomach.
As I had done the year before at San Remo, stress had left me vomiting a brown, bilious liquid that my HTC team doctor had then explained was stomach acid, and which he had treated with antacid medication. Twelve months on I recognised the same symptoms and so made my way to Manchester to see one of the British Cycling doctors, get it checked out and get some of the same tablets.
When I arrived at the velodrome that day and asked which of the doctors was around, I was told there was no one … except the psychiatrist, Steve Peters. Steve and I had known each other for years and got on OK, but our different takes on sports psychology meant that, unlike Vicky Pendleton or Chris Hoy, I was never going to be banging down his door for advice. My views were slightly more nuanced now than in the early part of my career – I no longer just needed ‘sunshine blown up my arse’, as I wrote in Boy Racer, because I got too much of that now and sometimes needed the opposite. Fundamentally, though, I still held the opinion that a lot of what I imagined Steve did wasn’t for me.
These opinions, of course, had no bearing on me seeing Steve quickly to get a prescription for some basic antacid pills. Or so I assumed. Two hours of what felt to me like intensive psychoanalysis later, I was no longer sure of anything.
It had started with what was, for me, an utterly baffling discussion about the exact colour of the vomit that I was trying to describe. The conversation progressed from there, eventually, into a full inventory of everything in my life and how it made me feel. At one point, he asked me about Milan–San Remo: we got on to talking about failure there, and suddenly he was questioning whether I should even be taking part. At first my reaction was that he was talking rubbish, but before long he had me doubting San Remo, doubting my ability, doubting everything in my life. At one point I was almost reduced to tears and felt like a basket case. I’ve seen Steve work wonders with others but the work he does is just not for me.
My sensations on the bike, like my mood, continued to fluctuate quite wildly in that period. I won the Belgian semi-Classic, Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne, at the end of February after a textbook display by the team, and took stage two of Tirreno– Adriatico in the second week of March before abandoning the race early, confident of my form ahead of Milan–San Remo later that week. Rod and the Team Sky nutritionist Nigel Mitchell had me experimenting with what was known as a ‘low residue diet’, the purpose of which was to completely clear your intestines of food residue and its surplus weight. The diet lasted about a week and in my case consisted mainly of egg and rice. Some of the other Team Sky riders, like Brad Wiggins and Edvald Boasson Hagen, had tried the diet and swore by it. We now hoped and thought that it would give me a decisive advantage on the short climbs that pepper the last 100 kilometres of Milan–San Remo. However, the main effect that it seemed to have was to deprive me of energy; I was dropped on the Le Manie climb with 90 kilometres to go and never really recovered. Nigel would do some fantastic work with me in my year at Team Sky, but this wasn’t an experiment that we’d be repeating.
I left Italy distraught, but two better performances without sparkling results at Dwars door Vlaanderen and Gent–Wevelgem brought much-needed reassurance. In my private life, too, things also felt a little calmer: as Peta’s due date had drawn closer, the excitement of becoming a father had also overcome my trepidation about the baby’s arrival. Peta finally went into labour on 3 April, and at five in the morning we headed to the Portland Hospital in central London. The greatest day of my life was about to begin. Over the next 17 hours Peta put my pain threshold to shame and made me glow with pride. At 10.30pm we finally had our beautiful baby girl: Delilah Grace Cavendish.
Everyone had told me that having a kid changes you and changes your life, but I hadn’t expected the transformation to happen so quickly. Now for every decision I took, from what I ate for breakfast to when I trained and went to bed, how it would affect Delilah would be the first thought that entered my head.
It was a lot to take on board. For a few days I oscillated between boundless joy and terrible anxiety that I wasn’t up to the challenges of parenthood. I remember one day a week or so after Delilah’s birth, in particular, when the weight of it all completely overwhelmed me. I was up at Rob Hayles’s place in the Peak District, training on the roads familiar from my gruelling first weeks at the Academy in 2003. The weather was gorgeous, and to Rob who was pacing me on the moped there was nothing obviously wrong as we came to a hill and started climbing. I’d made it a few hundred metres before the tarmac under the wheels started to feel like treacle, I could no longer feel the warmth from Rob’s exhaust, and I pulled over onto the grass verge. My bike fell to the ground as tears started falling from my eyes.
When Rob looked over his shoulder to check that I was still there, he saw me not bobbing up the slope but weeping back down the slope on the grass. He turned around, parked the moped, and came to put his arm around me. He didn’t need to ask what was wrong. Over several weeks he’d seen me growing more and more anxious, less and less confident of my ability to deal with fatherhood. They were natural, normal feelings, but at the time it took a lot of advice and support from true friends like Rob to make me realise that.
This period of readjustment – which really was all it was – lasted for a few weeks. As an athlete, you’re used to being – almost encouraged to be – self-absorbed, and Delilah and fatherhood released me from that inward-looking, self-obsessed spiral. In almost every interview I did that spring I was asked whether being a parent wouldn’t make me ride a little more conservatively, maybe to the detriment of my sprinting. I knew that wouldn’t be the case and why that was: a certain fearlessness was in my nature, and having Delilah was an incentive to work even harder and if anything take even more calculated risks to continue winning.
I returned to racing at the end of April in the Tour of Romandy, where I spent four days riding as a domestique for Brad Wiggins before pulling out on the penultimate stage. Brad’s determination and his physical condition had been impressive even at the training camps in the winter, and suddenly in races he could do no wrong. I’d always considered Brad the single most talented rider in the world, but for a long time doubted whether he had the application to win a Tour de France. But as he added victory in Romandy to the overall title that he’d taken at Paris–Nice in March, I already sensed that he was in process of proving me wrong.
As I prepared for the start of the Giro d’Italia – beginning in, of all places, Denmark – I still had no real complaints about the team. Yes, I was light on support at the Giro, with the Colombian climbers Sergio Henao and Rigoberto Urán also pursuing their own ambitious goals, but I’d known this would be the case since January and had fully approved. There was no point in devoting too many resources to helping me at the Giro when we’d be pursuing such lofty goals later in the year.
The lack of a bona fide lead-out train at the Giro initially concerned me less than Urán and Henao’s very individual – and I thought individualistic – style of racing. After my friend Taylor Phinney won the first stage for BMC, Geraint Thomas showed me exactly what I’d been missing with some brilliant work in the finale to set me up for victory on stage two. Gee had been as brilliant and selfless as the Colombians had been (and would continue to be) frustrating. In the first two or three hours of stages, the rest of the team would surround me in the peloton like bubble-wrap, and I’d be moving serenely along, only to notice that there were two riders missing: Henao and Urán. If we were lucky, they’d be skulking and nattering at the back of the peloton; if we weren’t, they’d lost a wheel through not paying attention and needed someone, usually Ian Stannard, to go and pace them back into the bunch.
Eventually I snapped at them: ‘You’re being asked to concentrate for four, maybe five, maybe six hours a day, you’re being paid very well, and yet you still can’t do it! If you were working in an office, you’d be there for eight, nine hours and you’d be sacked if you got distracted this easily!’ If they didn’t understand the words, because, with all due respect, neither spoke or understood English particularly well, they would certainly have known from my tone and gestures that I wasn’t showering them with compliments.
My tirade led to the management deploying Juan Antonio Flecha as the Colombians’ ‘guide-dog’. That, at least, was the term they used.
Flecha was outraged … or pretended to be.
‘Oh, I’m a dog now, am I?!’ he trilled, trying not to join in the laughter.
In fairness to Urán and Henao, by the end of the three weeks they had taken some of my ‘advice’ on board and we were getting on OK. They also rode pretty well: Henao would end up ninth on general classification and Urán seventh overall and first in the young riders competition.
For me, stage three should have been win number two, but a kamikaze manoeuvre from the Italian Roberto Ferrari put me on the deck 100 metres from the finish line and turned one side of my body into a smörgåsbord of road rash. I was fortunate that a rest-day – or at least a travel one – awaited us before the race resumed in northern Italy. Two days later, with the cuts and wounds still weeping and screaming at me like teenage girls at a One Direction concert, I won again at the end of a gruelling stage to Fano on the Adriatic coast. It was the 11th Giro stage victory of my career and by far the most important. The reason? Peta was waiting with Delilah at the finish and to see me win for the first time.
When I won another stage, in Cervere in the second week, I promptly abandoned my plan to leave the race that day. With only a week of the race to go I was leading the points competition, snug in the red jersey that was equivalent to the Tour’s maillot vert: there was no question of me pulling out as long as I still had a chance of winning that competition. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, as I lost out by a single point to the Spanish climber, Joaquim Rodríguez. Who knows, had I worn one of Team Sky’s own, high-tech skinsuits instead of the red all-in-one provided by the organisers, I might have been able to sneak inside the top 15 to gain the single point I needed to draw level with Rodríguez. With him leading the race on general classification and hence wearing the more prestigious maglia rosa, the red was passed to the rider in second place in the points competition, i.e. me. I tempered my bitterness, I should add, by conceding that Rodríguez was perhaps the more deserving winner, having cruelly lost out to Ryder Hesjedal for overall glory in those last 28 kilometres against the clock.
With the Giro over, all roads now led to the Tour de France. While Brad was underlining his credentials as a possible first British winner of the event by successfully defending his Dauphiné title, my last competitive outing before the Grand Départ would be at the ZLM Toer. This was a four-day stage race based in Holland that also took in some of the famous climbs of the Belgian Ardennes. It was a race usually dominated by sprinters, and this one lived up to that reputation, only perhaps not in the way that I or anyone else expected. I was beaten three times in bunch sprints, twice by the young German Marcel Kittel, and once by André Greipel, but despite this I pulled off a huge upset by winning the general classification. It was my first overall title in a professional stage race and one of the most remarkable results of my career.
The decisive stage took place on the third day, with the race going over one of the steepest and most notorious climbs in professional cycling: La Redoute in the Belgian Ardennes. At one point, surprised at how comfortably I was spinning my gear, I had looked around to see an array of grimacing climbers, all appalled that I was making it look so easy. I had then even attacked at the top of the climb to bridge a 50-metre gap to the lead group. Bernie wasn’t particularly impressed, saying later that I shouldn’t have been wasting so much energy so close to the Tour, but I was delighted.
At one point on the stage I had urged Juan Antonio Flecha to attack and thereby, in all likelihood, take the overall victory that his efforts deserved. He had declined the invitation in favour of protecting me, and in doing so I felt he’d more than earned his place in Team Sky’s starting line-up for the Tour de France. This, with hindsight, was where the fault-line with Team Sky began – the crack that soon became an unbridgeable crevice in my relationship with the team.
The week after the ZLM Toer, I discovered that only Bernie, and not Flecha, had made the cut. This took me by surprise as I had presumed that at least two riders would be dedicated to me and my green jersey charge. The message that it clearly sent was that the team had now decided to play it safe. I understood and would never have disputed that yellow should be our priority, but I’d been under the impression that ‘believing in better’, as per the BSkyB motto, was going to be about big ambitions, pursuing nearly impossible dreams, defying history and conventional wisdom. I felt sad and disappointed that we were already accepting compromises even before arriving in Liège for the Grand Départ.
I got the feeling that it was going to be a very long three weeks. How long, though, and how different my professional future was going to look in Paris, I could never have envisaged.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN riding a Tour de France in a team whose primary motivation is the yellow jersey and one with more diverse aims, like HTC’s had been, was summed up neatly on the first morning in Liège. At least, that was how I came to look back on an apparently trivial incident at breakfast in the team hotel.
I’m the first to admit – and have done already in this book – that I have fastidious, you might even say anal, tendencies. I also take my coffee very seriously, like a lot of cyclists do. So I was pleased, then, when I came down to breakfast on that morning in Liège to see a Nespresso automatic coffee maker. I was less amused, however, when I opened up the flap under which you insert your coffee capsule to find one that had already been used by whichever of my teammates had served himself before me.
An, ahem, short speech followed, after which I was sure the same thing wouldn’t happen again. Except it did, both the next day and again the day after that, until my morning diatribes were a feature of daily life – at least for the time that we were in Liège. Instead of the desired effect, though, all my speeches were producing was hilarity – so much so that the team produced a warning poster on my behalf and stuck it above the machine.
That was probably the most the team laughed in the entire three weeks – which in itself was telling – but the story of the coffee capsules became a kind of parable for me. For all that I loved Brad, Chris Froome, Richie Porte and the other guys, they were totally wrapped up in their own world – or their own coffee capsules, as it were. They had approached the business of making coffee the same way that they dealt with riding their bikes – with tunnel vision. The staff at Team Sky, I had noticed and would see even more clearly at the Tour, were there to execute their designated task and think of nothing else. It was efficient, it was professional, it put other teams to shame – but it also wasn’t a lot of fun.
With every passing hour in the days leading up to the Grand Départ, it became more and more obvious to me that, in the management’s eyes, going for green as well as yellow was simply too risky. When we talked about how I should approach the intermediate sprints, which my victory in the competition in 2011 had shown to be vital, I gathered that the team didn’t feel it would always be able to justify the efforts needed to get me into a point-scoring position. Out of sympathy or solidarity, Bernie said privately that he would try to give me a hand.
Our head directeur at the Tour was Sean Yates. One of only four British riders up to that point to have worn the yellow jersey at the Tour, Sean was revered as a legend of the sport in the UK. A superb time-triallist and domestique to Lance Armstrong, among other stars, in the 1980s and 1990s, Sean had known and been respected by Brad for years. Before the Tour I had done only one race with Sean, the Tour of Romandy, and quickly got the sense that he didn’t particularly rate or admire me. I assumed that it wasn’t personal and that he was one of those former bike riders with preconceptions about sprinters, namely that they were lazy and prima donnas. Sean’s man management also just didn’t suit me: I found him cold, uninspiring and miserly in praise. At Romandy I had buried myself for Brad yet couldn’t remember getting even a ‘well done’ from Sean.
I didn’t count on getting much support from Sean at the Tour, but even these low expectations were dashed. In our briefing on the bus before stage two to Tournai, I waited for him to talk about our plan for what was surely going to be a sprint … and waited. Sean didn’t even mention it; instead his instructions for the last 50 kilometres were all to do with Brad. Again, I think one or two teammates felt sorry for me; Edvald Boasson Hagen had a job to do for Brad, but he very kindly asked me whether he could somehow help. Eddy and Bernie did what they could, but two men were never going to be enough to set me up for the sprint, especially when Michael Rogers, Brad’s in-race ‘bodyguard’, tried to budge me off Bernie’s wheel. I ended up improvising, hopping from one opponent’s wheel to the next in the final two kilometres – ‘surfing’, as we call it in track racing. Finally, I came out of André Greipel’s shadow to take an improbable stage win, and one unlike any of my others in previous Tours. On the bus after the finish I wasn’t particularly jubilant or even vocal in thanking my teammates; frankly, it would have embarrassed them, because only Bernie and Edvald had helped me.
In Tournai I’d somehow muddled through, winged it to win, but I knew that wouldn’t work every day. With no team to surround, protect, escort him, a sprinter is left sailing in troubled waters, in the danger zone behind the arrow-head of the peloton, where the big sprinters and their flotillas cruise towards the finish line relatively unimpeded. This is where the real risks are being taken, where guys have to gamble, and consequently where the majority of crashes happen. In Rouen on stage four this was where I was, and the pile-up that duly ensued was a beauty. I wasn’t too badly hurt, fortunately, but it was abundantly clear to me not only that it could have been much worse but that it had happened because I’d been left with only Bernie to pilot and look after me. On the bus that afternoon the most shell-shocked of us all was Brad: 12 months earlier he’d seen months of hard graft jeopardised by one innocuous crash in the first week of the Tour, and the pile-up in Rouen had clearly brought back a nasty memory.
By this point, five days into the race, team staff and other riders were beginning to notice and remark on how quiet I was. In Rouen the management asked me why it was, and I responded that there wasn’t a lot for me to say about how we raced, since I wasn’t the leader. This was slightly disingenuous, because I did have very strong views not only on how I was being left exposed, but also how tentative the other guys were in the closing kilometres of stages. Urged to speak up at our briefing the next day, I said that it was in everyone’s interest to at least commit more, perhaps even just riding a couple of hundred metres on the front each: that would keep them out of trouble while also doing me a favour. Tim Kerrison, the team coach, also thought that one big effort like this at the end of stages would ultimately help our general classification riders to maintain and sharpen their form. Everyone agreed to give it a go, and the improvement was huge that day into Saint-Quentin. We still didn’t have quite enough firepower to put me in a winning position, but the team had looked far more decisive and far less vulnerable. The contrast between Brad’s mood that afternoon and his reaction the previous day was stark: ‘That’s how we fucking do it!’ he roared as he climbed onto the bus.
My optimism that night, unfortunately, didn’t even last 24 hours. On stage six, another sprinter-friendly one to Metz, a huge crash 26 kilometres from the finish left dozens of riders injured and even more delayed behind the pile-up ruled out of contention for the win. I had made it around the wreckage but to do so had skidded on my rear wheel, causing the tyre to explode. I immediately reached for my radio and announced that I’d punctured. I heard nothing so I repeated what I’d just said, all the time trying to cling on to the back of the lead group while riding on a flat. For a few hundred metres I was hanging in there, until the road began to descend and I could no longer stand the pace with no air in my tyre.
Finally, having remained silent in the radio the whole time, Sean Yates arrived in our first team car, waited while the mechanic swapped my wheel, then drove immediately off without even giving me a push, as is standard practice for the directeur sportif after a mechanical. Bernie had heard a muffled message in his ear a minute or two after my puncture, asked Sean to repeat it, but heard nothing back. Understandably, he had carried on, and I was left to claw my way back to the bunch alone. It’s normal – officially illegal but roundly tolerated – for riders to draft in their team cars’ slipstream after a mechanical, but Yates hadn’t stuck around to allow me this luxury. Needless to say, I finished in a group of stragglers, some six minutes behind the stage winner, Peter Sagan, and I was not in good spirits when I arrived back at the bus. I had never been left stranded like that after a mechanical, not even as a 22-year-old neo-pro in a tiny one-day race in France. Here we were at the Tour de France, on a stage that I was the favourite to win, and I was the world champion. I was heartbroken.
My manager, Simon Bayliff, had been following the Tour in his camping car, and came to see me after the finish that afternoon. I sat on the steps of the bus, out of earshot of my teammates and directeurs a few metres above me, and told Simon what had happened.
‘Sean fucking ignored me,’ I said. ‘He just left me. It was horrible.’
It was 6 July. This was the date when I realised this could be my first and last Tour de France with Team Sky. It was also the date of my last conversation with Sean Yates.
WHILE I’D CONTINUE to do my best, offering Brad as much assistance as I could both on and off the bike, from Metz onward it was sometimes hard to reconcile my own frustration with the team’s rampant success. First Chris Froome won the first big mountain stage in the Vosges, with Brad taking the yellow jersey on the same day. Then that pair finished first and second in the next big general classification showdown – a time trial in Besançon.
After the first big Alpine stage to La Toussuire, the media would forget the murmurs about my dissatisfaction, forget even that a Briton had a realistic chance of winning the biggest race on earth for the first time, and shift their attention instead to a perceived rift between Brad and Chris. Chris had been selected for the Tour as Brad’s domestique de luxe in the mountains, yet had briefly accelerated away from his leader on the climb to La Toussuire, embarrassing and briefly isolating Brad, and also sparking debate about who should be leading Team Sky.
My own view from inside the team was that Chris had acted in good faith, just a little clumsily. If he’d wanted to betray Brad, he would have attacked on the penultimate climb that day, not the final one, and he wouldn’t have waited when he got the order to stop his effort over the radio. It was easy to see it as evidence of Chris’s naivety, which could make you either laugh or wince at times, both on and off the bike. It may also, however, have been that Chris, like me, felt that we had gone from having the opportunity to aim for the moon and the stars to a risk-averse strategy with just one aim: securing the yellow jersey for Brad. To my way of thinking, we could have been leaving Paris ten days later with yellow, green and nine of the cuddly lions given to the stage winner every day.
Brad didn’t say a lot that night, but it was obvious that he was upset or angry. Usually, when he was the next in line after me for a massage, he’d swagger into the room cracking jokes or taking the piss. That evening he sat on the adjacent bed waiting for me to finish without saying a word. I could see that he probably wasn’t in the mood for talking, but as I got up to go I told him that I just had one thing to say – that in my opinion Chris hadn’t meant any harm and that, if he had, he wouldn’t have waited on the climb. I’m still not certain what was weighing more heavily on Brad’s mind – the idea that Chris was out to flick him or the fact that Brad had shown a chink in his armour for the first time since the start of the season.
There was no doubt that the story of a ‘civil war’ was being blown out of proportion in the press, and Chris continued to do a sterling job on the road. I helped the team where I could in the Alps, hopeful that stage 15 to Pau, at least, would give me another shot at a stage win. Although classed as a ‘flat stage’, the course that day was anything but, with incessant short climbs and the race taking two hours to settle into the usual format of a break gaining time then slowly being reeled in. I had fire in my legs, so when Greipel’s Lotto teammates asked Bernie whether we would help them to bring it back together for a sprint, and Bernie asked me over the radio whether I was up for it, I didn’t hesitate.
‘Do I want a sprint? Fucking right I want a sprint.’
And so Bernie and Lotto rode. The guys in the breakaway were quality riders and specialists in this kind of exercise, so it was tough going, but we began to eat inexorably into the gap. Or we did for a while. It was a hot day, Mick Rogers was on bottle-duty, and with around 50 kilometres to go he went back to the team car to fetch drinks. A few minutes later, when Mick reappeared close to us, we heard Sean’s voice in the radio: ‘Guys, stop riding. We’re not going for a sprint. We’ll just control it today.’
It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened: Mick was knackered and, even in the last stage before a rest-day, wasn’t required to exert himself for the sake of me possibly winning a second stage. Once again I was disgusted, and once again I reacted by remaining silent and doing what was required of me to help Brad for the remainder of the stage.
There had been hints in the press throughout the Tour – and they would continue in the final week – that I was unhappy about not being the centre of attention in the team. In fact, the opposite was true – that was one of the few things that I was enjoying. In Pau on that second rest-day the whole team was herded onto a sun-blasted hotel terrace for a press conference attended by hundreds of journalists and dozens of TV crews, but nearly all of the questions were for or about Brad and Chris. When the end of the conference degenerated into the usual free-for-all, Brad and Chris struggled to extricate themselves, while I slipped back to my room almost unnoticed.
By now, my manager Simon and I were clear in our minds that I could never race another Tour like this one. This would clearly hold implications for Team Sky, but, for the moment, they had much more pressing matters to deal with. Brad and Chris continued to dominate in the Pyrenees, with Chris flexing his muscles and pulling away from Brad again on the climb to Peyragudes. Brad manifestly wasn’t impressed, but reacted in much the same way as I did to my frustrations: he kept his emotions to himself. He was closing in on Tour victory, the dream for any cyclist. That, surely, was the most important thing.
I perhaps didn’t always show it, but in those last few days I felt immense pride at what we were in the process of achieving, even if we could have been doing much more. Two days from the end, in Brive-la-Gaillarde, I listened, open-mouthed, as Sean outlined his plan for the day in our pre-stage briefing on the bus: we’d let the break go and have a quiet day. Fortunately, the other directeur, Servais Knaven, queried this, then Brad also chipped in that, in his opinion, we should ride for a sprint. Dave Brailsford had the final say.
‘Cav’s been fantastic for Brad, he’s been patient, and he deserves a chance today,’ Dave said.
Six hours later, after a superbly committed performance from the whole team, Brad even led me and the peloton into the final kilometre, with a break still a few seconds ahead of us. It was going to take a very long sprint and a remarkable comeback to catch them, but my form was now superb and there were riders all over the road, whose wheels I could ‘surf ’. It turned out to be one of the most spectacular and emphatic stage wins of my Tour career.
After a penultimate-day time trial won by Brad, sealing his overall victory, it was on to the formality of a final-day stage win for me, given that I’d never lost on the Champs Elysées. For a few hours I was able to put the disappointments and regrets of the previous three weeks and concerns about my future to one side and revel in the moment. Brad, in the yellow jersey, led me down the Rue de Rivoli, under the kilometre kite: Edvald came next, then I bolted as we swung out of the Place de la Concorde and was never seriously challenged.
Throughout the stage I had beamed with pride at the guys’ dedication right to the end. It’s common for most of the riders at the Tour to, if not completely let their hair down, at least treat themselves to, say, a beer and a pizza on the penultimate evening, but Brad, in particular, had insisted on us remaining fully focused. He had done it for me, not himself, and the guys responded with a performance that compelled me to thank them all individually in e-mails the following week.
All wasn’t quite well that ended well, at least not as far as I was concerned, but I was delighted for Brad and thrilled to have contributed to such a historic moment for British cycling. It had been a very long journey, one that like Project Rainbow Jersey had started years earlier, with a vision that through hard work had been moulded into a plan. This had then come to fruition only thanks to some hugely talented and dedicated individuals. Everyone at Team Sky deserved immense credit for that.
At the same time, I knew that I deserved better. Prioritising yellow over green was of course logical, of course the right thing to do. Ignoring the points competition and near enough ignoring me altogether, though, was not something I could accept.